Live more in today, in the now, in the here

Hello friends!

I am very fond of philosophy and, although I am not a philosopher, I study from time to time the thoughts of these great geniuses. One of the most incredible is the philosopher Immanuel Kant, who, in addition to influencing several other areas, had a special impact on psychology, which would be born well after his critical productions in the 18th century. In your famous book The critique of pure reason, in which he uses reason to establish the very limits of reason, he makes an incredible claim: time and space are forms a priori of sensitivity. I explain, time and space are not in things and in the relationship between them, but they are “within us”, they are, let’s say, in our mind and always serve as a reference for our knowledge.

In other words, we can’t think of anything outside these categories, I mean, we’re always making relationships between space, inside and outside, up and down, etc., and spatial relationships, cause and effect, before and after, past and future. As the Irish writer James Joyce says, in Ulysses, “A very short space of time through very short times of space”. Translating: a small space of time through small times of space.

Anyway, it’s not even Kant or Joyce I want to talk to you about today. If you reached this line, then, I say about the content of this text. Since we cannot escape time and space, how can we change, modify, subvert our conceptions to live better? They say depression is too much of the past and anxiety too much of the future. If so, how can we live better by modifying our time and space?

Isn’t it amazing to think that the future never arrives? Tomorrow is tomorrow and will always be tomorrow, that is, if we project a desire into the future, like achieving something, reaching a goal, carrying out a project, we are throwing an idea into the future. It is as if we were saying that we will only be happy when this future arrives. Of course, the days go by and one day what was future becomes present. However, if we create this dynamic of leaving our happiness in the future, we will always be postponing our happiness.

Well, if time is a fundamental reference for what we know and think, we can better consider the divisions of time we make. The most basic division is between day and night. All cultures in our world have words for this radical change in the amount of daylight and its absence at night. Another interesting feature is that sleep and dreams divide one day into the other and in dreams we experience psychic changes that are not always conscious.

So one tactic to lessen anxiety about the future or the depressive tendency to dwell on the past is to focus all your attention on today. As they say, each day with its worries. If we establish our mental focus only on today and create goals for today, such as a priority list of things to do, we will already be living with more intensity. It’s like carpe diem, seize the day. In any case, the future is always only possibilities and, without wanting to be tragic, we may not even survive until then.

live more now

If we further reduce our temporal horizon, and move from the distant future to today and even to the present moment, to the now, we will see very interesting things. Not only will we be able to increase our productivity, keeping our attention on just one activity at a time, but we will also be able to get rid of a lot of unnecessary psychic content, even if it is only now-now.

And to do this is very simple. Ask yourself, “What is happening right now?” Are there any bad, unpleasant, uncomfortable facts that are happening right now? Or is everything you’ve been suffering from in the distant past or hasn’t happened yet – and might not?

live here longer

Another way is to think about the here, the space around. If distant time is always in our head, if we change the direction of our attention from the mind to the body, to the five senses and feel the “here”, immediately, we start to be more in the now. Then we can ask, “What is going on here? How can I change my environment to feel better?”

From my clinical experience, I see that many sufferings are totally useless. And a very simple and easy way to reduce this suffering is to live more in today, in the now, in the here.

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